"Althouse appeared to have fared the worst, with a number of missing entries and comments — and a full 24 hours offline."

You could say that... if by "a number," you mean 23,850 missing entries and — what? — a quarter million comments!

And those hours offline entailed readers going to my URL and seeing a notice telling them that my blog had been removed from the Blogger system. I have worked for 7.5 years building up a readership, and thousands of people were given the false information that the site no longer exists. I have to hope that they don't take that information seriously and that they try again now that the blog is restored, but that hurt a lot more than if the blog were displayed but not working or if it didn't display but the notice accurately explained that it was only a temporary outage.

At the Magnolia Café...

... I'm just trying to eat my pancake... and come up with some Monday morning posts. Talk about whatever you like. Tell me what I should link to over at Instapundit. Or here.

(Photo taken yesterday, at Longnecker Garden. You do know about the longnecker conspiracy don't you? There were lots of mothers there too!

"Apparently, I’m supposed to have sex with Ann Althouse and Glenn Reynolds before I die."

"Or, perhaps, shoot them – which, wouldn’t that violate the New Civility Rules?"

"She makes him sound like a cocktail onion, or maybe a shrimp."

"I’m picturing those little fake swords that they use for appetizers at parties, though she probably means the metal or bamboo skewers one employs in a shish kabob."

Oh, I was picturing one of these, when I wrote that, but now that I think of the original situation, one of these was all it took.

"And [Peggy Noonan], Ann Althouse, and Megan McArdle will have to deal with it for the rest of their lives."

"Those three women have all been an intellectual blessing to public discourse in this country, but they all succombed [sic] to the same cult of personality two years ago, and we still do not know what the final price tag on that cult of personality is going to be."

Note to Little Miss Attila. Not everyone who voted for Obama voted for him for the simple stereotypical reason you keep in your head. If you want to know why I actually voted for Obama, read "How McCain Lost Me." The bottom line was:

1. [McCain] did not understand economics, the most important issue.

2. He lost the ability to make the experience argument [when he picked Sarah Palin for VP].

3. He never defined himself as a principled conservative.

4. Erratic and incoherent, he lacked sufficient mental capacity.

I'm not happy with the job Obama is doing, but it could be a lot worse, and what McCain would have done is something we will never get to see. I won't accuse you of succumbing to a cult of personality if you are imagining some wonderful McCain presidency that would have been, but you can't compare that what never happened to what is happening now.

In the end, we were stuck choosing between 2 far from perfect men, and I voted for Obama without being caught up in any sort of giddy emotionalism.

Andrew Sullivan has discovered the Michelle Goldberg/Ann Althouse diavlog.

He says "Michelle Goldberg gets it." Fine, but did he get as far as this clip, where Michelle says something that makes me say, "You hear that, Andrew?"?



Goldberg went to Wasilla to report for The Nation during the campaign, and there she heard the wildest rumors but the one thing nearly everyone agreed about was: "Yes, we all know that Trig is her baby."

ADDED: I know Sullivan wants me to check out his list of "lies." I picked one to check out, that she said the only flag in her office was the Israeli flag. As Sullivan himself notes, she must have meant to say the only foreign flag, since she did also have an Alaskan and an American flag in her office. That's the sort of sloppy speaking that one would correct easily if it were pointed out at the time. Of course, I also have the state flag and the American flag. I mean, it would be pretty ridiculous for a state governor to only have a foreign flag! There isn't even a motivation to lie.

That there's no motivation here doesn't mean it's an "odd lie" — which is Sullivan's term. It means it's not a lie at all. What's odd is his definition of a lie. If I said I was just wearing jeans to a party, you wouldn't have exposed me as a liar if I turned up wearing a shirt and shoes as well. In fact, you'd sound like a dork — or, with good enough delivery, a comedian — if you said, "You liar. You said you were just wearing jeans!"

Calling something like this a lie marks you as someone who's centered not on finding out what is true, but on destroying someone. It doesn't motivate me to go through the rest of the long list systematically to see what each item is about, and it certainly doesn't make me want to look at the list and accept the conclusion that wow, Sarah Palin really is a terrible liar.

ADDED: Little Miss Attila is afraid to watch the diavlog, and naked Tom Maguire devises what would be a traffic-grabbing title, if anybody ever Googled that.